The Attributional Beliefs of Hearing-Impaired Students Concerning Academic Success and Failure

Academic attributions, developed by students to explain success or failure, were examined for 225 hearing-impaired students. The students read descriptions of academic experiences of hearing or hearing-impaired students and derived causal explanations of these experiences. Results indicated that patterns of attributions of hearing-impaired students closely resembled those of hearing students. The internal factors of ability and effort received the strongest attributional ratings for success, whereas the external and unstable factor of luck received the weakest rating. Additionally, there was evidence for an in-group bias by hearing-impaired students in attributing more importance to the personal qualities of students like themselves when success was experienced, relative to the attributions made for hearing students; this bias was also shown in the explanations given for success in the classrooms of hearing-impaired versus hearing teachers.